exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

How to start & stop mediac.tos?
Recently, @exxox , I came across your mediac.tos
-> https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/last/floppy/index.htm
So I was curious what it would tell about my machines.
At first I gave it three tries on my TT, with MAGX, NAES and plain TOS:
But all three failed, giving no message at all, but immediately freezing the
machine so that reset was requiered.
Then, second, I gave it three tries on my Falcon, with MAGX, NAES and plain TOS:
With MAGX there was a message "Disc may have changed!", but then I found no exit
so a reset was necessary.
With NAES a spoiled screen appeared, no redable message, reset needed.
With plain TOS same.

Just reporting.

It was written in STOS and should only be used to test my 1.44 kit on a ST under TOS. So don't know why your trying to run it in other machines anyway?

There is no way to exit the program no. It was a quick and dirty program to get the job done.

exxos wrote: 23 May 2020 08:43 It was written in STOS and should only be used to test my 1.44 kit on a ST under TOS. So don't know why your trying to run it in other machines anyway?

Would be nice to know the behaviour of any Atari on media change, not only with your specific 1,44 kit implemented.

exxos wrote: 23 May 2020 08:43 There is no way to exit the program no. It was a quick and dirty program to get the job done.

Even a quick & dirty program imho doesn´t need to crash or failling exit. If you´d open it´s source and may be I understand what you´r really looking at then might be that someone would rewrite it from pig into a proper pigeon.

What does the message mean "Disc may have changed!" ? I definitly did not change the medium, neither in A, nor in B (where I´m running a reset surviving RamDisk).

The program just reads a value which TOS sets. It is documented somewhere about it likely in generic documentation. The program just loops and outputs the value which TOS gives. It is like 1 line of code. STOS isn't designed to be run on other machines, TOS versions or multitasking OS's. It may work better if patched, but it was written before STOS3 was done anyway. Even so, you should not be trying to run a program written for the ST on other machines in the first place. I likely don't have the source from years ago, but just look up how TOS works and its just a matter of reading the value TOS returns. As to if that value is even used in higher TOS version, I have no idea, you would have to look into it all. The messages are per TOS documentation, again you would have to learn what TOS does to understand it.